


A Time For Coffee

by ganvogh



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Desmond Lives, Desmond has nightmares, Hurt!Desmond, Hurt!Shaun, M/M, Oversharing, Shaun tries his best, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 01:26:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ganvogh/pseuds/ganvogh
Summary: In which Desmond Miles is a precious little ray of sunshine who just wants everyone to be happy, Shaun cares more deeply than his sarcasm lets on, and Rebecca knows everything Shaun doesn't.Featuring a butt-load of teeth-rotting domestic chatter, some late night cuddling, grocery expeditions, Spotify playlists, and Shaun's vivid imagination.(Currently under review)





	A Time For Coffee

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is interested, the Spotify playlists I refer to are all real ones I've created. You can check that out if you like! :)
> 
> Chapter One - (Kitchen Playlist) https://open.spotify.com/user/_geopat_/playlist/3ZxwAoi0vhO0qAstBVf4iZ

Shaun blinked slowly in the dim artificial light of the Monteriggioni sanctuary. His amber eyes had grown tired and glassy, pulled down by the weight of his lower lids that bloomed with darkened mauve. He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes roughly, feeling a slight wetness as his fingers brushed over dampened eyelashes.

Twenty-four hours.  
That was all it had taken for another team to be ruthlessly intercepted and removed. A quick email from William had confirmed their suspicions of a mole gathering sensitive information from the inside and relaying it back to Abstergo operatives.

He placed his glasses upon the table and sighed audibly, the sound emphasised by the quiet darkness of the Auditore underground. He checked his email once more, skimming over his earlier conversation with the Mentor. He frowned, re-reading the last once more.

_Know that this is a decision I don’t take lightly, but taking recent events into account, I simply can’t take any further risks with your current mission. Finding the apple is our first and only priority right now, and having you remain in an open channel to communicate with the remaining teams is placing this in more danger than I feel necessary. I already have my suspicions within the network, so I’d like to keep this all as contained as possible._

_I want you and the others to stay off-the-grid until further notice is given by myself, and myself only. I’ll be in contact with you directly once this has been dealt with. Divert your attention to aid with decoding more sequences. Desmond’s progress remains satisfactory, but we’re still nowhere near close enough to the progress I expect to see. Make sure he knows this._

_Take care,_

_-William_

He had felt a little shocked at the decision to take them off the grid entirely, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. In all honesty, a bit of a break from overseeing the rest of the teams would do him some good, and free up a bit of time to work on the database and provide support to Desmond. He felt a pang of irritation at William’s casual disregard for how much work his own son was putting in. There was a vast difference between the mentor seeing results on a flat screen to watching a real human being live as someone else with your own eyes.

He got up from his seat, wincing as he stretched out his numb legs and back, both giving a satisfying pop. It was now around 3AM, Lucy would be out in the Monteriggioni rooftops keeping an eye out for any signs of danger, and Rebecca was already asleep across the room.

He trudged over to his sleeping bag, ready to collapse himself onto its surface to catch something that resembled sleep, before he needed to get up again in a measly 3 hours. He had to decide how he wanted to break the news to the team. He predicted he would likely send it in an e-mail, cold and hard facts to detach them from the people themselves and focus instead on the Assassin cells. It was a cowardly way to address such an awful situation and he knew it, but any words Shaun might think to voice would die in his throat long before they were spoken.

Just as he was about to settle down, a voice broke the silence around him.

[“Claudia, are you okay? Where is Mother?”]

The perfectly accented Italian that rang out sent a chill down his spine, so incredibly unlike Desmond's laughable attempt at trying to lighten the sombre and pressing atmosphere by addressing the nearby statue of Altair. The gesture hadn’t been lost on Rebecca and himself, both trying to join in on the banter, but it was not one that Lucy had taken lightly.  
Logically, Shaun knew how Lucy had interpreted the moment. Desmond messing around because he didn't understand the sheer importance of what they were doing here. Treating it all like one big game, the same thing he had been doing to the Assassins for years. Hell Shaun might have even looked at it like that too, William’s emails of thin concern for his son wrapped in a winter scarf of icy words, harsh criticism and disappointment always echoing in his head each time he looked at the man.

But lately, he had begun to suspect otherwise.

Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t ignorance that drove Desmond to joke around and pester them at every opportunity. It was _compassion_.  
He simply cared too much about other people to let them deal with this kind of shit on their own. While the rest of them had long accepted the mind-set that came with the job description, settling into the hard lines of their faces and left running fingers over their own calloused patchwork hearts, Desmond was always there, offering his friendship, encouragement and an unbelievable amount of sheer _warmth_.

 _“How could you have possibly stayed so bloody optimistic for this long?”_ Shaun had asked him a month previous, 5AM on a Monday morning. Shaun returning from Lucy relieving him of lookout, and Desmond awake a half hour before with a hoarse throat and the remnants of ghosts he had never met. He had turned on a soft playlist from the cheap speaker bought on the last run, careful not to wake Rebecca at the other end of the room, and poured them both a cup of coffee.  
The historian’s slender cold fingers were seeking out his mug for warmth as the question tumbled from his tongue, before the morning coffee could wrap itself around his throat.  
Desmond had looked over from his position sitting on the counter, despite being told numerous times from Lucy not to perch himself there, his own mug pressed to scarred lips as defensive curiosity glinted from underneath long black lashes.  
_“Someone has to be, don’t they?”_ he had replied simply, a small huff of bitter laughter as dark whiskey eyes swept over him, burning into the dusting of freckles on his face. Shaun had leaned back against the counter, elbows brushing against the assassin’s knees, as he closed his eyes and listened to the sound mellow out the mood.

And he was right. If not him, then who else would smile and laugh at Shaun's dumb jokes and sarcastic quips that the others simply rolled their eyes at? Who would place their hands on the back of his chair and let their eyes wash over the cork bulletin board as they listened to him rant about history and the state of American politics, despite being a big dumb American oaf themselves? He engaged Rebecca, humoured her mad and excited ramblings about the Animus, and asked questions even although he likely couldn't understand a word she was saying about it. When Lucy's mask of leadership slipped to reveal all the stress and worry she was so good at hiding, Desmond was the first one there with a steady hand on her shoulder and an offer to take her lookout shift so she could get some rest.

After his realisation, it began to leave Shaun a little uncomfortable for Desmond to offer so much, and yet receive next to nothing at all. Their lives were so much less miserable because they had the equivalent of a walking ray of sunshine making them their beverages, memorised just the way they liked it, ensuring he talked to them each day about their lives and their work and silly things like if they preferred dogs or cats or what city they wanted to see the most.

And after all that, they repaid him in hushed conversations, barely above the sounds of him screaming into his pillow, seeing his ‘family' murdered before him as Lucy dismissed it as something to ignore. His own father advocated shoving him in the Animus until he was practically a vegetable, and he obliged without a single complaint. Err, mostly.

Shaun hadn't been at all surprised to see Desmond snap back at Lucy in front of the statue of Altair, before he had quickly left to get some air. You can only push someone so hard, until they inevitably snap. Desmond simply had the unfortunate habit of being an easy target to shove.

[“No! It can't be!]

Shaun could hear the utter devastation in Desmond's voice, something he absently hoped he would never have to hear in English. He sighed and crossed over to him silently, having already settled into soft flannel pyjama pants and a grey tee earlier, his socks padding lightly on the cold concrete flooring.

 [“Oh God, Father!”]

The anguished scream that ripped from Desmond's throat startled him, his brows furrowing. He looked over to Rebecca to find her still asleep, headphones snug over her ears. There was a reason the girls slept with them on, and it wasn’t because they were particularly overjoyed about Shaun hacking them their own Spotify profiles.  
The nightmares only seemed to be getting worse. Three skeleton closets worth of nightmare fuel to deal with must be absolutely _exhausting_ , never mind that these particular skeletons made for a whole walk-in closet each of fucked up, complete with little hidden compartments and plenty of storage space for extra trauma.

He looked like absolute shit, which wasn't exactly easy if you happened to be, well… _Desmond Miles_.

He lay on top of the bed roll, fists bundled tightly in the blankets, a light sheen of sweat making his skin reflective of the humming light of the power cells that littered the underground. Dark circles pestered the soft skin around his eyes, his brows firmly knotted together like a puzzle that just couldn't be figured out. There was a wetness that trailed down to the value pack grey pillow, his lips slightly parted as he breathed out soft and broken gasps.

He was crying.

Shaun kneeled down beside him, resting on the side of the covers, and placed a hand tentatively on his arm, the muscles taut underneath too-warm skin. The historian’s hands were always cold, but Desmond’s skin was burning to the touch, radiating out even underneath his black tee.

“Hey, mate...” he tried softly.

The last thing he wanted was Desmond to wake up as Ezio and think he was some sort of crazed Templar trying to murder him in his sleep. _Again_.

He was still recovering from the angry hand-shaped bruising around his neck from the last time ‘Ezio’ had quite nearly strangled him to death for trying to be considerate.    
He had found himself in a particularly compromising position, after trying to struggle away from darting hands had eventually allowed for his kicking legs to be spread at either side of Desmond's hips while he was holding him down roughly by the neck. Shaun had gripped Desmond's wrists, pushing up in an effort to remove the deadly assassin that seemed to be trying _very_ hard to remove his head from his neck.

Of course struggling wasn't really working and only served to give Desmond more room to crowd him in. Both the girls _conveniently_ happened to be on a grocery run, leaving him alone with a particularly homicidal assassin. He became rather sure the last words he would ever hear was Desmond shouting [“Templar dog!”] inches away from his face, clothed in nothing but boxers with his crotch pressed firmly against Shaun's arse. Both crotches seemed to be, embarrassingly enough, _very_ happy about their current arrangement.

His mind was due to short-circuit the moment he devoted a split-second to thinking of how it could feel under slightly different circumstances. Like, perhaps the younger assassin pressing into him while uttering sounds so filthy. And oh then, how he'd be so _full_ , he wouldn’t be able to see and touch and _think_ anything but Desmond, Desmond, _Desmond_ and he would be left helplessly unable to do anything but take absolutely everything the assassin was willing to give, his own name spilling from kiss-bitten and cherry red lips, washing over them both like a mantra. _Fuck_ he was already so _beautiful,_ but how would his olive skin look gleaming over him in the dark and tinged blue in the lights of the sanctuary, golden eyes blown wide-

His famous last words were probably going to sound like humiliating squeaks of protest, caught somewhere between being alarmingly turned-on and utterly terrified.  

But thankfully, ‘Ezio’ had slowly returned to Desmond as white had danced at the edges of Shaun's vision. Hands loosened from their vice-grip around his neck as something in the Assassin's eyes shimmered in a faint gold for a second, ending as Desmond all but collapsed onto him like a cheap deckchair. Both of them were left gasping for air, Shaun all too aware of Desmond's bare skin resting against him with his lips lightly pressed and huffing short breaths onto his sensitive neck. He had eventually spoken in a voice hoarse with shouting and sleep, slightly deeper than usual and gasping out his name as a breathless question. It had gone straight down south as it reached his ears, Shaun only able to groan in response as he suppressed a shiver.

Desmond had jumped up as if Shaun had set his skin on fire, sputtering out a long string of apologies, backing off and out of the room while whimpering something about watch duty.

Shaun was left lying in Desmond's sleeping bag to stare at the ceiling as his breathing returned to normal, a little confused, a little more scared, and aggressively aroused.  

Desmond had spent the next few days avoiding his gaze entirely or glancing under his collar when he came to sheepishly pester him about history, making the historian flush a not-entirely-unpleasant shade of pink as he stuttered out the latest fact about Cesare and the rest of the Borgias, voice a little hoarse from having the air forcibly prevented from entering his lungs.

The girls had looked questioningly at him and then each other.

 _“Shaun, you alright?”_ Lucy had asked, her concern visible as she looked at his neck.

 _“Yes, yes I'm fine!”_ he had hurried out. _“Just an accident in the shower, nothing to worry about!”_ He had given his best convincing smile, and she had eventually nodded slowly, slightly bewildered.

He glimpsed a knowing, cheeky curiosity in Rebecca’s expression as she glanced between Shaun's maniacal smile and Desmond's mortified expression, grinning into her coffee. She had returned herself to the animus maintenance before Desmond was able to catch it.

Shaun had realised how it both sounded and looked, and to her credit it was almost exactly that, except with (regrettably) less sex and a tad more murderous intention.

“Desmond...” he tried again.

“C'mon, you have to snap out of it...” he tried shaking the man lightly, finding himself immediately regretting it when shimmering eyes opened wide in panic.

He barely had the time to register a surprised “ _fuck”_ , before Desmond shot up and strong arms were unexpectedly wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him into the most urgently crushing embrace he had ever experienced. He would later deny the small squeal of shock that escaped his lips until his dying day.

[“Leonardo.”] he whispered, Shaun’s eyebrows raised in curiosity as he paused. [“I could not save them. My father, my brothers… It should have been me as well.”] He wept broken Italian, littered with bits of English, over and over.

Momentarily frozen, Shaun let out a breath he hadn't realised he was holding as he brought his hands up to awkwardly pat the soft cotton of his tee.

It seemed to loosen the little control the younger assassin had over the situation, his voice breaking painfully as he began to sob, his shoulders shaking with the intensity and his hands tightly fisted into the back of the historian’s t-shirt.

They sat for what felt like a very long time, Desmond clinging to Shaun for dear life with his face buried into the crook of the other’s neck.  
The older assassin briefly played with the thought of removing him, of detaching himself and using the usual biting sarcasm to cover up the raw intimacy of the moment, but stopped himself before doing it.  
The feel of warm fingers passing over his as he was handed tea and two chocolate digestive biscuits he hadn’t asked for earlier on that day, the night before when he had woken up from being asleep at his desk to find his glasses neatly removed and a red blanket draped over him, a voice singing horrible classic rock tunes as he tried to focus more on the road and less on the tone-deaf bright smile next to him with the even brighter eyes- all floated into his mind. So, instead of pushing him away, he began to gently run his hands along the younger’s back and mutter the kind of soothing sounds he figured might help.

His Italian was more than a little rusty, but he could give that a decent shot too.

[“It's okay. You're going to be alright.”] he attempted in a soothing tone, one that was for sure as foreign to Desmond as the language he was speaking.  
When there were no more tears left, just an occasional gasp for air that had been lost, there was a pregnant silence before a quiet voice mumbled into his shoulder.

“...Shaun?” it questioned, almost silent.

"You were having another nightmare." he answered back, voice hushed and not daring to raise it above the quiet of the room.

Desmond let him go slowly, almost reluctantly, as he looked around, and then settled upon Shaun again.

“I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to-” he offered, a half-heard excuse dying on his lips.

Shaun offered an uncharacteristically shy smile in return, holding his hands up.  
“It's quite alright. What's a long night-time embrace shared between two friends anyway?” he huffed out a laugh and tried not to focus on the intensity of the moment that seemed to have descended on them.

“I suppose it's a little better than the last time you tried it, anyway.” He laughed along, timidly eyeing the newly exposed darker patches of skin usually kept hidden by his shirt. Shaun felt a familiar flush creep up his neck as he swallowed nervously and looked away. His breath hitched as gentle fingertips were placed on his neck, so different than what they were used for around a week ago. Desmond's fingers ghosted over the marks he had left, visible now that there was no collar to conceal them.

"Does it still hurt?" He asked, quiet and hesitant, as if he was afraid of hearing the answer.  
Shaun turned to look at him once more, noting his look of concern.  
" _No_." he said quickly, almost too quickly.   
If he was to tell the truth, the bruising was still more than a little tender. Plum-coloured markings faded into peach, and then queasier tones of lemon as it healed, easily standing out against the pale of his skin.   
Desmond looked rather sceptical as he took his hands away, prompting Shaun to sigh.

"Honestly!” he huffed, “You would think I’ve never had someone try to kill me before!”

Desmond's eyebrows quirked, his sheepish expression almost worth the scolding.

“This has happened to you before?”

Everything except the raging hard-on as a result of it, he wanted to say, but decided against it.

“Desmond, just out of my- general curiosity, what exactly _do_ you think happens to people who snoop around in Abstergo business?”

Realisation replaced the shame on Desmond's face, before giving way to a stark and angry expression. Shaun couldn't help the slight internal chuckle at Desmond getting angry on his behalf, over something that happened so many years ago, no less.

How disgustingly adorable.

“They didn't exactly just link arms and walk me out of my apartment when they took me, like some sort of Jason Statham re-enactment of The bloody Wizard of Oz. Just follow the yellow brick road into the van, would you please Dorothy? We’ll have your shiny red shoes chained to a rock at the bottom of The Thames soon enough.”

He paused, taking note of the upset on Desmond’s features.

He sighed, the heat suddenly gone from his words.  
“When they told you I was taken, what did you think that meant?” he questioned, voice barely above a whisper. “I had illegally broken into their mainframe, before leaking an entire section of their level-3 classified files. Then I done some asking around, trying to find the right stories to expose them as the super-secret-underground-organization-hell-bent-on-enslaving-all-of-mankind kind of thing I had discovered they were.”  
He looked to the statue of Leonius, thinking back to when Templar agents had broken down his door, smashed up most all of his belongings, and then later decided to break several of his bones for good measure. He remembered wondering, delirious and unable to scream due to the cloth shoved in his mouth sealed with duct tape, if his cat was going to be alright on her own before they managed to find wherever his body ended up after this. He remembered the taste of his own blood running down his throat from where his nose had been broken and his lip had been split, and was more than halfway to bleeding out in a crumpled heap when Rebecca and a few others had hacked the van he was travelling in and dragged his sorry arse out of it.

“They offered me a place with Abstergo at first.” He said after a small time had passed. Desmond only looked at him, his expression unreadable, expecting Shaun to continue the story.

“I told them they could go fuck themselves.”

Desmond smiled then, with a huff that was almost a laugh, as if this response was completely expected of him.

“What did they do then?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper, as if he already knew the answer. Shaun frowned, fixing his gaze down to his t-shirt.

“They beat me until I was almost out, and then tried to ask me again,” He sighed, wishing he had even a tenth of courage left from when he was younger and had less self-preservation.  
“I told them I would never become something like them. That all the money in the world wouldn’t mean anything to me if it meant sacrificing everyone else for it. So I looked right up into that big fuckwit’s eyes and told him I would rather die.” He pulled up his t-shirt slightly, exposing scars speckled like ivory over the freckled pale of his skin.  
A bullet wound rested in the middle of them, years old now.

“So he shot me.” He said with such a cold air of finality, no hint of emotion behind it. The pain had been indescribable, like pouring molten magma into his veins and feeling it solidify as he struggled to remain conscious. He was extremely lucky it hadn't hit anything vital, or his life would've been over in just an excruciating few minutes.

There was an unspoken tenderness in the moment, one that would likely be gone by the morning. And maybe it had been a long day, or a long month, or maybe a year… but when a gentle hand returned to his skin once again, tentatively sweeping over the softness of his belly, he didn’t feel the urge to shy away from it. He just allowed Desmond to brush his fingertips along the expanse of sensitive skin, over every scar, every freckle, stroking over the old bullet wound with his thumb as if to smooth it away.  
He didn’t quite think of himself as something to be touched this way. Touch was not something the distant and cynical were used to experiencing. Hands were always rough, they bruised and cut into him like thorns, left him bleeding on the hardwood floor, spilling out onto crumpled paper and dirty sheets.  
And yet, the younger assassin had always touched him softly, traced around him as if he were something worth mapping out, something worth trying to mend. Trying to heal.

He silently wondered when it had come down to _this_ , to so readily accepting Desmond's touch and _trusting_ him in such a way that made him want to spill his guts out onto the floor every time they spoke. When had he gotten so attached? They had been together as a team for a little over four months now, and Shaun had spent at least two of them glaring holes into the guy’s skull if he so much as looked his way. Because everyone thought this guy was so bloody _special._

So, when did the historian begin to see him like that too?

“Is he dead?” the coldness of Desmond’s voice brought him from his thoughts, brows furrowing as he looked into hard eyes. “The guy that done this.” He accentuated his words with a final brush of fingers over the scar, before withdrawing his hand and sitting up to basket his legs.

“Yes. Galina killed him while Rebecca got me out.”

Desmond nodded, satisfied with the response, eyes seemingly returning to their usual soft nature.

“William wants us off-the-grid.” He stated, figuring he may as well.

“Why?” the younger assassin stiffened at the mention of his father, but it did little to subdue his worried tone. “Did something happen?”

“Another team was compromised yesterday. One of my contacts. There was video footage. It was… not pleasant.” He said, much quieter than he had been before.  
Desmond says nothing in response, because there are no words to say. He simply places a hand on Shaun’s shoulder, strong and steady and grounding him to the room. Something snaps within the historian, forces himself to crash against the Assassin as if the weight of his own grief were pushing him down.

“God, I can still hear them screaming, Des…” he whispers into the other man’s chest.  
“All of them, just- just _gone_. And I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”  
He doesn’t cry, can’t remember the last time he even had, but he grips Desmond’s t-shirt as if he needed to stop himself anyway. He feels a hand card softly through his hair, reassuring, as he focuses on reminding himself to breathe. He does, taking in the mildly clean scent of soap and shampoo the younger man had used that morning and the slightly earthier spice of deodorant.

They sat for a while, both finding some level of comfort in the presence of the other.

“You want to get some coffee?” Desmond asked faintly, answered with a silent nod from the other. He gave a final soft pat to Shaun’s lower back as they stood.

“Shaun?” Desmond questioned hesitantly as the historian began walking towards the kitchen.

“Yeah?” he answered back over his shoulder.

He suddenly smiled to himself, something private that the older assassin almost felt like he was intruding on. He glanced back up at the taller man, something slight and tender there.  
“It’s nothing.” He paused, unsure, before brightening up again.  
“Hey, you think you could cook breakfast like you did last week?”

“You want a full English at _four_ in the morning?” he replied, incredulous. Desmond only grinned innocently in response, prompting an exasperated sigh from Shaun.

“Come on, then. I need to make my coffee first.”

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is interested, the Spotify playlists I refer to are all real ones I've created. You can check that out if you like! :)
> 
> Chapter One - (Kitchen Playlist) https://open.spotify.com/user/_geopat_/playlist/3ZxwAoi0vhO0qAstBVf4iZ


End file.
